Find files and send to a temp file

Question

Vim does support a nice option to accept a file with list of files that are then opened in a Quickfix list. Rough example, I find all files in ~ that are smaller than 1KB and pass this to Vim:

find ~ -type f -size -1k > /tmp/1 && vim -q /tmp/1

I would love to use that as zsh suffix alias:

alias V='> /tmp/1 && vim -q /tmp/1'

So that I can:

find ~ -type f -size -1k V

I use several convenience suffixes:

alias -g H='| head -n'
alias -g X='| xargs -d"\n"'

So that I can:

git log H 5

And finally I'm approaching the Question itself.

It makes me sad that I cannot use mktemp to create that temporary file. Tried all the stupid rookie shell script tricks:

find . | tee QL=$(mktemp) && vim -q $QL

I assume the solution is so simple I'd be put to shame.

At the moment I use:

find ... | xargs -d"\n" vim --

But this only fills in a list of buffers, and doesn't populate Quickfix of Location list, even though I think a command may be passed to Vim with -c to do so. There's a warning "Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal", and then after you quit Vim, terminal fails prints ^D ^M instead of Ctrl-C Ctrl-D afterwards, though this may be fixed by adding ttyctl -f to .zshrc, but in Vim itself Tab and Backspace keys misbehave in Ex mode which is very annoying.

Answer 1

As long as what you posted is currently working for you thus far,

find ~ -type f -size -1k > /tmp/1 && vim -q /tmp/1

And you merely want to be rid setting up the intermediary file > /tmp/1 && and /tmp/1, see if this works for you:

vim -q <( find ~ -type f -size -1k )

Explanation

• from your original code, you seem to be using find to generate desired file list with your particular criteria, then it was saved to /tmp/1 which was merely an intermediary file just so that vim -q filelist could be done, because vim -q expects a file argument
• <( commands... ) is one of Bash's process substitutions , automatically runs a command and saves output to a system temp just for this purpose /dev/fd/63 if you are curious
• vim -q then thinks it is getting a file, and for all intents and purposes, it actually is, so it works

Additional tips

If you do not absolutely have to use vim's quickfix feature, but merely just want a way to quickly edit multiple files, remember you can send vim multiple file arguments (vim file1 file2...) so if we modify your original find, we could:

find ~ -type f -size -1k -exec vim {} +

Within vim

• :args will show in the status bar, the argument list, like: file1 [file2] file3 if you are currently editing file2
• :n to navigate to next file in argument list
• :wn to write next meaning save this file and auto open next file
• :prev to go to previous file

Answer 2

After a long while I'm now able to answer my own question.

Top down:

alias -g V='| tee $(rm fifo.tmp; mkfifo fifo.tmp && echo fifo.tmp) &; vim $(< fifo.tmp ) && rm fifo.tmp'

That is a zsh alias that allows for:

find . -name TODO V

or

ls | grep asciidoc V

and get all the files opened as buffers in Vim.

Somehow this doesn't work without tee, e.g. replacing | tee with > does not open any buffers in Vim.

What we do here is we create a pipe named fifo.tmp, tell tee to redirect output from previous command to it and send this to background; meanwhile we read this pipe in a subshell and put the output as list of files to be opened by Vim.

This however doesn't work well with file names that contain whitespace.